I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 983: You Idealists Are the Worst

Several hundred years later, the Great Dao Book Pavilion.

Jie Ming sat cross-legged in the void of his sea of consciousness, a jade slip floating before him.

He had been here a very long time. Beside him lay a heap of classics he had already read through, and what he was reading now was a sword cultivator lineage of considerable fame within the cultivation system.

The reason he was studying these things was not that Jie Ming had suddenly developed an interest in the Dao of the sword. Rather, in the course of delving into nature cultivation, he had gradually grown curious about one question.

What kind of cultivator, exactly, would regard nature cultivation as more important than life cultivation?

According to the materials he had collected so far, most cultivators stressed the importance of the dual cultivation of nature and life.

Of course, because their understanding was skewed, the overwhelming majority of cultivators in fact focused on life cultivation.

Schools that genuinely put the cultivation of nature first, even to the point of looking down somewhat on life cultivation, were not many.

After some sifting, Jie Ming discovered that the most famous of the “nature cultivators” were, of all people, the sword cultivators.

On reflection, that did not seem so strange.

Sword cultivators had always emphasized state of mind and will. Many lineages even held that the key to attainment in the Dao of the sword lay not in how strong a body the sword-bearer possessed, nor in how much spiritual power he had accumulated, but in whether he could nurture a sword intent of his own.

Powerful sword cultivators, moreover, were often able to kill enemies above their level.

For them, a gap in realm certainly mattered, but it did not necessarily decide the final outcome.

Sometimes a sword cultivator of lower cultivation, so long as he truly grasped sword intent in some moment, could cut a stroke that surpassed his own limits.

This phenomenon clearly bore some relation to the nature cultivation Jie Ming had come to understand.

Since nature cultivation could raise a practitioner’s command of his own power, then the sword cultivators, a school that placed such extraordinary stress on temperament and will, might help him understand the essence of nature cultivation.

With that thought in mind, Jie Ming had specially gathered a large batch of sword cultivator classics, meaning to search them for answers.

Then he discovered that he seemed to have made a wrong decision.

“What is ‘where the heart leads, the body follows, and at last it comes home’ supposed to mean?” Jie Ming looked at the text in the jade slip, his brow slowly furrowing.

“And what is ‘where the mortal heart leads, a single thought holds heaven and earth’?”

He opened the next classic.

“‘Once sword intent is formed, all things may be a sword; where the thought arrives, heaven and earth answer its wish’… Is that right?!”

Jie Ming fell silent for a moment, then finally could not help griping: “Hold on, guys. Are you really this idealist?”

He brought the jade slip up to his eyes, as if wanting to confirm he had not missed some key annotation.

Regrettably, the whole classic stressed thought, will, sword heart and sword intent over and over, yet rarely explained how these things actually influenced the outside world.

Where it occasionally mentioned concrete methods of cultivation, these mostly amounted to having the practitioner temper his temperament without cease and firm up his own conviction, until one day everything suddenly became clear and he grasped the true meaning of the Dao of the sword.

As for why, after grasping it, one could cut a stroke far exceeding one’s own power… to the sword cultivators, that was simply a matter of course.

Enlightened is enlightened. If I want it, I can do it!

Jie Ming slowly set the jade slip down. “Tsk! These idealists are the worst. Not a shred of reasoning!”

Unwilling to give up, he leafed through several other lineages.

The results were no better.

Some sword cultivator classics stressed cutting away distracting thoughts, holding that so long as one’s thought was pure, one’s sword intent would be all the sharper.

Some held that a sword cultivator must believe without question that the sword in his hand could cut anything, and that even facing an enemy far beyond himself, he must never feel the slightest doubt.

The more Jie Ming read, the odder his expression became.

He admitted these theories might genuinely work.

After all, sword cultivators killing enemies above their level was no legend fabricated by certain classics to attract disciples. It was backed by a large body of real cases.

But precisely because of that, he found it all the harder to understand.

If a sword cultivator’s power really could be raised through temperament and will, then there had to be some mechanism of action behind it.

What exactly did their sword intent change?

Their own rune structure? A manipulation of external laws? Or some power that ordinary cultivators had not yet understood?

Surely it could not be that one only had to believe one could cut heaven and earth open with a single stroke, and heaven and earth would obligingly step aside?

If that were really so, then would not every problem he had run into over the past thousand-odd years of researching Leap Power have been solvable by firming up his convictions?

Jie Ming shook his head and put all the remaining classics away.

He decided, for now, to give up looking for the answer to nature cultivation directly in traditional sword cultivator theory.

These sword cultivators were simply too idealist.

Not that there was anything wrong with idealism as such. It was that their theories so often jumped straight from result to conclusion, with the explanatory process Jie Ming valued most missing from the middle.

He was a staunch materialist.

Even having come into contact with transcendent existences like wizards, cultivators and even ninth-level beings, he still held that these things were merely a reality he did not yet fully understand.

Power could exceed common sense, laws could differ from the physical principles he had once known, and life could even influence the world through thought.

But so long as these phenomena genuinely existed, there was bound to be an inner mechanism worth studying.

To Jie Ming, transcendent power did not mean one could give up on understanding.

Quite the opposite: the stranger the phenomenon, the more it deserved study.

The sword cultivators clearly did not think that way.

They seemed not to care whether the whole process could be explained clearly. So long as they believed in their own Dao of the sword, so long as their sword intent could be raised, then any theoretical contradiction could be set aside for the time being.

This difference was what kept Jie Ming from ever truly getting through the door.

And yet, as he closed the last classic, something suddenly occurred to him.

“Wait…”

Jie Ming sat up straight again, his gaze falling on the sword cultivator classics he had already set aside.

If the essence of sword cultivation really did lean toward idealism, then was the reason nature cultivation could add extra power also connected to idealism?

The moment this idea appeared, it made him take things seriously again.

He already knew from the classics in the Great Dao Book Pavilion that nature cultivation was not simply raising mental power. Rather, it gave the practitioner a deeper command of his own temperament, will and power.

But the question was, could merely raising the efficiency of control really explain how those sword cultivators killed enemies above their level at every turn?

Jie Ming did not deny that a stable temperament brought benefits.

But if it were merely a matter of making oneself calmer and more focused, at most that would reduce mistakes and raise the efficiency with which power was used.

For a sword cultivator of lower cultivation to suddenly erupt with power far beyond his own realm, there seemed to be a key link still missing.

Unless… what nature cultivation raised was not merely the ability to control power one already had, but something more special.

Jie Ming’s thoughts turned rapidly, and he recalled the ninth-level creature he had seen in the Central World.

Thanks to his True-False Void-Piercing Pupil having inexplicably risen to its highest level back then, he had been able to see the principle of “thought becomes reality” all the more clearly.

That was a power that could, in accordance with its own will, directly alter the surrounding rune structures that represented the essence of the world, and thereby influence reality.

Its thoughts were no longer merely mental activity. They could directly take part in the running of the world’s underlying rules.

Precisely because of that, it could turn “thought becomes reality” into power in the true sense.

A ninth-level creature did not simply believe that something would happen. It could, by means of its own special ability, make the world change in accordance with its will.

So then, did nature cultivation have a similar principle behind it?

If so, certain special feats of the sword cultivators seemed to admit of a new explanation.

The reason they stressed thought, sword intent and absolute conviction was perhaps not that these things could create power out of thin air by themselves, but that some special process of nature cultivation let their will and their power structure form a far tighter bond.

To put it more simply, the reason sword cultivators… and even cultivators of both nature and life could gain an additional boost was that they had, to some degree, obtained a power of a higher order.

“On this point, the cultivator and wizard systems arrive at the same place by different roads.” Jie Ming’s eyes gradually brightened.

Back when Jie Ming had advanced to the sixth level, he had already confirmed that the reason high-level wizards could fight above their level, and with such outrageous combat power, was in large part that high-level wizards had already obtained in advance, through their Law Solidification Domains, a portion of the traits of ninth-level beings.

With that understanding, his research direction became a great deal clearer.

After these years of research, he was all the more certain that he could not possibly set foot on the sword cultivators’ path, because his way of thinking differed from theirs at the root.

But that did not mean Jie Ming could not use the power of idealism.

Firmly believing in materialism was itself a way of perceiving the world.

In essence, it too was a kind of transformation of the mind and mentality. One might call it the idealism of “firmly holding to materialism.”

Conventional idealist cultivation tended to stress sudden enlightenment, conviction and breakthroughs in one’s state of mind.

Some cultivators suddenly achieved enlightenment in some moment and their power surged accordingly, but far more spent their whole lives unable to cross some obstacle in their state of mind.

The ceiling of this path might be extremely high, but it could hardly avoid being affected by personal comprehension and the state of one’s temperament.

The way Jie Ming held to, by contrast, was to search as far as possible for the mechanism that could explain a phenomenon, and then, through study, analysis and practice, master it step by step.

This way might not let him erupt, like certain sword cultivators, with power far beyond his everyday strength, but it had one obvious advantage.

So long as the direction was right, he could keep improving himself through continuous study.

He did not have to wait for some unpredictable enlightenment, nor stay stuck in place forever because of some problem of the mind he could not see through.

What he had to do was not deny these phenomena, but find a way of explaining them that suited himself.

“Since a ninth-level creature can mobilize the world’s underlying power in accordance with its will, then I can keep researching along that direction too.” Jie Ming stroked his chin.

“I only need to work out exactly how their conviction influences their power.”

Jie Ming closed the classic before him, and his consciousness withdrew from the Great Dao Book Pavilion.

Author’s Note: Damn! Sudden toothache. It hurts.